This Extraordinary Place: What You May Have Never Known About the Planet You Live On

Part Two of Four: A Mindful Earth Day 🌎✨

Space is only 62 miles (100 km) away.

Let that sink in for a moment. The edge of space — the point where astronauts are considered to have left Earth — is just 62 miles above sea level (NASA JPL Education). For most people, that's a short commute. A Sunday drive. The distance you'd travel to visit a friend or watch a game without thinking twice.

We often think of space as impossibly far. But the edge of the extraordinary is closer than most of us may have realized.

Earth Day is an invitation to feel awe for the world we live in. Not to read about it. To actually experience it.

So today, we want to stop you in your tracks (the way a view from 62 miles up might stop you) and let the planet you're standing on take your breath away.

Space-Time Traveler

Right now, as you read this, you are hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 km/hour) (Space). That is the speed at which Earth orbits the Sun (the same as flying from New York to London in 3 minutes). The ground beneath your feet appears perfectly still, and yet in the time it takes to read this sentence, you have traveled hundreds of miles through the cosmos.

You are already a space traveler. You have been one your entire life.

And you also travel through time with every glass of water you drink.

Earth’s water is almost entirely recycled in a continuous loop, with very little being added to or lost in space. The water of our world constantly moves through oceans, clouds, rain, rivers, ice, and living bodies. The same molecules are repeatedly redistributed across long spans of time, which means the water in almost every glass you drink contains molecules that are extremely old in a planetary sense—some of them likely once passed through dinosaurs, and through countless humans and other organisms that shaped Earth’s history.

The hummingbird

Each spring, the ruby-throated hummingbird — a bird that weighs less than a nickel — flies nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico. That crossing is approximately 500 miles (805 kilometers) of open water, completed in 18 to 22 hours of continuous flight (Journey North). No rest. No land. No guarantee.

To prepare, the hummingbird nearly doubles its body weight in the weeks before departure, gorging on nectar and insects until it has stored enough energy to survive the crossing. It arrives on the other side sometimes weighing less than when it started its preparation, having burned through everything it stored.

Think about what that means. A creature the size of your thumb, crossing a sea, alone, on nothing but what it gathered in the weeks before it leapt. No map. No mission control. Just the pull of something it knows to follow.

Where most of our oxygen actually comes from

It’s easy to assume trees provide most of the oxygen we breathe, but the majority is actually produced in the ocean.

Microscopic (smaller than the eye can see) marine organisms like phytoplankton, algae, and cyanobacteria carry out photosynthesis on a massive scale, generating an estimated 50–70% of Earth’s oxygen (NOA, Berkeley). These tiny, drifting life forms form the foundation of ocean ecosystems and quietly sustain the atmosphere.

So while forests feel like the lungs of the Earth, much of the oxygen we rely on is created far from view, in the sunlit layers of the sea.

The fungus and the long count of time

In Oregon, the largest known organism on Earth is not a whale or a redwood. It is a fungus, spreading beneath the soil across nearly 1,000 hectares, and it may be as old as 8,650 years (Scientific American).

Around 8,650 years ago, agriculture was already underway in parts of the world, with early farmers cultivating domesticated crops and beginning to experiment with irrigation (DIG). Writing systems had not yet been invented (Britannica). The wheel would not appear for several thousand more years (Britannica). The pyramids were 4,000 years in the future (Smithsonian). Every empire that has ever risen and fallen — Rome, Egypt, the Mongols, the British — has come and gone in the time this organism has been quietly spreading through the soil of a mountain in Oregon (History).

This organism knows time differently. It is a gentle reminder that the planet is not in a hurry. We are.

More trees than stars

There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way (One Tree Planted). Scientists estimate our galaxy contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars; a number so large it dissolves into abstraction. And yet Earth holds an estimated 3 trillion trees. Three trillion. Rooted, breathing, interconnected organisms stretching across continents and climates, from dense forests to remote regions few humans have ever seen.

We live on a planet that is alive in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The Sahara feeds the Amazon

Every year, dust lifted from the floor of the Sahara Desert travels across the entire Atlantic Ocean and is deposited in the Amazon rainforest, carrying the iron and phosphorus the rainforest needs to survive and flourish (NASA)

The driest place on Earth feeds the wettest. A desert in Africa nourishes a jungle in South America, across 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of open ocean, carried by wind. The Earth is not a collection of separate places. It is one interconnected, circulating system.

What to do with all of this

Awe is not just a feeling. Research consistently shows that experiences of genuine awe — the kind that makes you feel small in a good way — reduce self-focused thinking, increase generosity, and make people more likely to act on behalf of something larger than themselves. Awe is, it turns out, one of the most pro-social emotions we have (PMC).

Which means this: taking ten minutes today to genuinely marvel at where you are is not indulgent. It is the beginning of care.

So here is our invitation for Earth Day:

• Go outside — even if it’s raining, snowing, or less than ideal — and simply notice the world around you

• If you can, take off your shoes. Feel the grass between your toes. Splash into a puddle. Blow the seeds of a dandelion. Plant something!

• Watch the trees in your neighborhood sway in the wind. Some were here long before you arrived, and some may remain long after you’re gone.

• Look up. The sky stretches only about 62 miles before it becomes space. Watch the clouds shift and change. Notice the light of a star that began its journey billions of years before it reached your eyes.

• Breathe in the air made, in large part, by invisible ocean life.

All while letting yourself be moved by the quiet marvel of it all.

That’s where care begins—not in obligation, but in kind attention. And you can’t love what you’ve never really seen.

Happy Earth Day.

This is the second in a four-part Earth Day Week series inspired by the Artemis II mission, exploring presence, perspective, letting go, and finding our way together. Part one: To the Moon and Back: They Traveled 250,000 Miles to See What's Right in Front of You. Part three: They Lost Signal Behind the Moon - Here's What That Teaches Us, arrives Wednesday.

If you feel the pull to go deeper, to bring this quality of attention not just to Earth Day but to your everyday life, we are here.

The Mindfulness and Health Institute offers free live meditations every week that follow the Mindful Monday theme. See this week's theme.

And if you're ready to explore further, our full range of evidence-based courses are waiting, ready whenever you are.